[kscoyote]

The end of Liberal football as a juggernaut began in the early '90s. National Beef moved to town in 1993, which was about the same time the Cessna and Beech assembly plants left town, all of which came on the heels of a downturn in the local oil business. What that created was a sudden and drastic change in the demographic makeup of Liberal. As whites left town with the aircraft and oil jobs, Hispanics were moving in to grab one of National Beef's 3,000 gigs.

By 2006, Liberal High School was 63 percent Hispanic, 28 percent white and five percent African-American.

The trends are similar in nearby Garden City and Dodge City, both in the communities and on the playing fields. Garden City played in the state title game three times in the '90s, winning the 1999 state championship, but hasn't been back since. Dodge City, a traditionally strong program, hasn't played in the title game since 1985 and has won 39 percent of its games in the last six years.

Meanwhile, Liberal's boys soccer program, born in the mid-1990s, quickly became a state power, advancing to the last two state tournaments.

Bozarth doesn't find this confusing in the least.

"I can tell ya," he said. "We have a different racial makeup in our high school, and they like soccer better. That's it."

Rozelle Webb is the executive director for Liberal's Chamber of Commerce, a born-and-raised Liberalite who now lives in a town much different from the one in which she was born. She said Liberal's economy has benefited greatly from the immigrant population and thinks the community is largely used to itself now, but concedes it hasn't always been easy.

"Part of life is change," she said. "I know some people have a problem with that. Change is hard, but it's not a bad thing."

Maybe not, but it has been painful, and not just in Liberal.

Racial tension

Sixty-six miles north, Garden City was feeling those same tensions in the late '90s. From 1980 to 2000, the Hispanic population, drawn by meat-packing jobs at IBP and Monfort, increased from 16 percent of the total population to 43 percent.

In 1997, intra-racial tension began to boil at Garden City High School, much of it between American-born Hispanics and Mexican immigrants — the Chicanos and the wetbacks, they called each other. Eventually, the strife came to include everybody, and at a school so diverse the classrooms are labeled in four languages, it got complicated.

"It was a thing where, if you were born here, you're not as Mexican as I am because I was born in Mexico," said Joaquin Padilla, a counselor and soccer coach at Garden City. "They carried their own flags and stuff like that. They said, 'Brown power,' 'White this and that,' and things like that. Blackouts, things like that. We had 2,000 kids here, but it wasn't 1,500 kids that did that. Unfortunately, the other 1,800 or 1,500 got included in that also."

Fights were commonplace, and by the time fall homecoming came around, school administrators were concerned enough about the possibility of a riot that the only people allowed in the gym for homecoming festivities were the candidates, someone to crown them and a camera guy. Everybody else watched on closed-circuit television from the relative safety of their classrooms.

The fall of '97 was a flashpoint, but it wasn't just a high school clique war.

Padilla moved to Kansas by himself at age 13, taught himself English, got the first of his two master's degrees and in 1983 moved to Garden City to become a guidance counselor. Over the years, he has seen a lot of Mexican kids just like him come into Garden City High, but hasn't seen enough of them stick. Their families have tended to be transient, their social interaction limited and their goals short-sighted.

"A lot of the kids didn't finish school because there really was nothing beyond high school," Padilla said. "So they would go to IBP (formerly Iowa Beef Processors) and work."

This has wrought a clear social barrier separating immigrant families from established Garden Citians. On the edge of town, there is a trailer park, mostly inhabited by Mexicans. Historically, they've been reluctant to assimilate to the rest of Garden City.

"A lot of the minorities, particularly the Mexicans, we don't jump into the mainstream of things," Padilla said. "We stay at the edges of the main circle."

Something about that just never has sat well with the more established community.

"There were some issues," Padilla said. "Some were saying, 'Why are you here?'"

CJOnline / The Topeka Capital-Journal - Spike in immigration has spurred popularity of soccer